The Pandemic Effect: Ninety Experts on Immunizing the Built Environment

By Blaine Brownell

In The Pandemic Effect, 90 leading architects, designers, materials scientists, and health officials reflect on the influence of COVID-19 on buildings and cities—and propose solutions to safeguard the built environment from future pandemics, viruses, and contagious diseases on every scale, from surfaces to society.
 
Safety and sustainability in buildings and cities have taken on new meaning during the COVID -19 pandemic. Buildings became magnifiers of contagion instead of shelters for protection. In this essential resource for both practitioners and students of architecture, interior design, and urban design, 90 of the world's leading experts investigate a variety of approaches to future-proof architecture and buildings against widespread disease.
 
These inoculation strategies are organized into five chapters: "Histories" offers an overview of past pandemics and prior architectural approaches; "Inside / Outside" addresses the roles of building envelopes and mechanical systems in improving indoor environmental quality; "Interventions" consists of contemporary methods for direct prevention and control; "New Strategies" consists of various architectural analyses and proposals for design changes; and "The Public Realm" considers the urban landscape and related social questions. This broad collection of perspectives explores the transformations underway in the built environment—and offers design strategies to limit the severity of subsequent pandemics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781648961922

Blaine Brownell

Blaine Brownell&mdash;an architect, educator, researcher, and former Fulbright scholar to Japan&mdash;has authored eight books on advanced and sustainable materials for architecture and design. He has written the <i>Mind &amp; Matter</i> column for <i>Architect </i>magazine since 2009, and his work has been published in more than 70 architecture, design, science, and news journals including the <i>New York Times,</i> the <i>London Times,</i> the <i>Wall Street Journal,</i> and <i>Nature.</i> He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Book preview

Cover: The Pandemic Effect, Ninety Experts on Immunizing the Built Environment by Blaine Brownell

Chapel of Healing, see page 140

Biochromic Window, see page 80

Nearby Nature, see page 186

Urban Sun, see page 112

Glass Walls, Glass Ceilings, see page 42

Reforestation from Within, see page 74

Natural Healing, see page 182

Redesigning Schools, see page 152

Atelier FCJZ, see page 168

Home.Earth, see page 136

We Need Our Parks, see page 166

Multisensory Wayfinding, see page 150

Quiet Zone, see page 100

Covid Confessionals, see page 172

In-Car Care, see page 134

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

HISTORIES

Past responses to pandemics and the reconsideration of traditional design approaches

Chapter Two

INSIDE/OUTSIDE

Interior-exterior relationships and the influence of indoor environmental quality on human health

Chapter Three

INTERVENTIONS

Prevention and control methods to monitor, protect, and adapt postpandemic spaces

Chapter Four

NEW STRATEGIES

Updated approaches to designing spaces and systems for pandemic-influenced human activities

Chapter Five

THE PUBLIC REALM

Pandemic-responsive cities, landscapes, and infrastructure that support public health and environmental justice

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Image credits

This book is dedicated to the memory of Richard Ingersoll, who shaped my understanding of the societal influences of architecture—and to all the others who were victims of the coronavirus pandemic.

Introduction

The novel coronavirus pandemic that emerged in late 2019 resulted in a significant death toll and disrupted human activities worldwide, leading to consequential changes in healthcare, work, retail, school, entertainment, and daily life. The global crisis caused by COVID-19, the illness propagated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was not only medical but also existential. In addition to prompting advances in public health, the pandemic motivated reconsiderations of the status quo, resulting in unprecedented shifts in commerce, telecommunications, mobility, policy, employment, education, and culture. Yet, despite a societal upheaval of such magnitude, the ensuing public conversation regarding the coronavirus and its potential solutions has failed to bring adequate attention to a subject of fundamental importance: the built environment.

In the US and similarly industrialized countries, people spend 80–90 percent of their time indoors. When considering the broader built environment—the area developed for human habitation outside of the wild—this figure approaches 100 percent. Physical context plays a significant role in transmitting infectious disease—the cause of approximately one-third of annual deaths worldwide. Yet, there is insufficient awareness about the influences of architecture, infrastructure, and the constructed landscape in spreading illness. Scientists have noted the lack of critical data related to human mobility and interpersonal contacts within the built environment. Beyond isolated laboratory studies of specific physical influences on virus transmission, there is a dearth of analysis regarding the impacts of building attributes and spatial settings of various scales. As the authors of a 2021 National Library of Medicine study argue, The built environment deserves immediate attention to produce place-specific strategies to prevent the further spread of coronavirus.

Throughout history, when adequate attention has been paid to the influence of constructed spaces on disease, the knowledge has inspired measurable enhancements in buildings and cities. Improvements in sanitation and living conditions, for example, have contributed significantly toward curbing infectious diseases in human populations. In the field of public health, the domain of environmental health emerged in the nineteenth century as the study of the relationships between individual health and the environment. Originally termed the Sanitary Revolution based on a series of strategies to control communicable diseases exacerbated by unclean conditions, the environmental health movement inspired proposals to reshape the medical field to address prevention adequately in the twentieth century. The built environment was influenced in-kind: according to Beatriz Colomina, modern architecture developed many of its characteristic qualities in direct response to tuberculosis, the dominant medical obsession of its time.

Yet despite the measurable improvements sanitation systems have brought to our buildings and cities, a widening gap currently exists between environmental health knowledge and its application. In the built environments of more economically developed countries, comfort and convenience are now prioritized over health. Buildings with inoperable windows ensure indoor temperature and humidity control while shutting out fresh air. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems prioritize establishing an ideal interior climate over eradicating harmful chemicals and pathogens. An emphasis on cost reduction has resulted in the proliferation of cheap building products composed of detrimental synthetic substances. A predisposition against physical exertion privileges elevators and escalators over stairs and ramps. The car is widely preferred for mobility over the bicycle or public transportation. And the most significant example of prioritizing convenience over health is global warming—the deterioration of our planetary climate due to thoughtlessly produced greenhouse gas emissions.

Ironically, the Sanitary Revolution facilitated today’s life of convenience by diminishing the threat of environmentally transmitted illness. Widespread hygiene standards in more developed parts of the globe are now taken for granted. And yet, the emphasis on sanitization has gone too far. Chemical disinfectants and antimicrobial coatings have unintentionally led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens that pose a severe health threat, particularly in hospitals. Hermetically encapsulated interiors diminish occupant access to fresh air and daylight while increasing the prevalence of sick building syndrome. A dislike for the unruly and unpredictable hazards of wild landscapes has led to the proliferation of the manicured, monocultural lawn.

Considered in the broadest conceptual terms, sanitization has come to shape our general approach to the constructed world. The word sanitize has two connotations: to reduce or eliminate pathogenic agents and to make something more acceptable by removing, hiding, or minimizing any unpleasant, undesirable, or unfavorable parts. Not only do human developments seek to eliminate pathogens but also to remove any undesirable elements in the landscape, including all unwanted flora, fauna, and fungi. This treatment is not limited to buildings—even natural spaces, such as gardens, parks, and greenways, are controlled, forests are managed, and coastlines are regulated. As the world becomes more urbanized and what is left of wilderness rapidly shrinks, planetary bio- diversity is plummeting, soil health is deteriorating, and ecosystems are collapsing. We have, in effect, over-sanitized the globe—and at great peril to our long-term health.

The coronavirus pandemic resulted primarily from the disregard for the built environment’s influence on health. Like SARS, bird flu, and Ebola before it, COVID-19 is a disease that emerged from an animal source. Such illnesses result from habitat destruction and biodiversity loss precipitated by human development. As more wild places are invaded and modified, more pathogens are anticipated to cross over from animal to human populations. Once a novel pathogen is established in a human community, the dense configuration of our cities and the interconnectedness of our mobility networks—particularly international air travel—facilitate global transmission. More-over, as a virus spreads globally via human hosts, the airtight disposition of many buildings and their inadequate airflow and filtration further enhance disease transmission between the hosts and other occupants. Considering how architecture has changed over the last two centuries, today’s built environment represents a success in implementing hygiene as a part-to-whole, or inside-out approach—but a failure in the broader establishment of environmental health as a whole- to-part, or outside-in phenomenon.

Unfortunately, the public health sciences have not adequately addressed this failure. Despite the significance of the environment on human health, this subdomain comprises only a tiny portion of the broad spectrum of determinants of health that includes medical care, individual behavior, social circumstances, and genetics and biology. A recent comprehensive review of leading public health sources indicates that the environment is believed to account for only seven percent, or the smallest impact, of all health determinants. This insufficient attention is reflected in higher education, where the number of degrees conferred to environmental sciences has declined relative to other areas of public health, such as health policy and management.

Nevertheless, the definition of environmental factors is now expanding to include a broader set of influences. According to the National Academy of Sciences, In contrast with traditional environmental health approaches that focus primarily on toxic substances in air, water, and soil, this more recent approach conceptualizes the environment more broadly to encompass a range of human-made physical and social features that are affected by public policy. As a result, decision-makers have begun to recognize the health implications of built environment influences not previously considered in health policy. As a recent National Institutes of Health report argues: It’s time to consider the causes of the causes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new urgency to the imperative that we advance our understanding of the built environment’s role in ensuring public health. The idea for this book originated as a way to catalyze the creation and sharing of this knowledge. Since the time of the coronavirus’s initial foothold on human society, experts in architecture, engineering, medicine, and other fields have been investigating myriad topics related to COVID-19 and the ways to understand and control this disease and future pandemics. However, before this book’s publication, this content had not yet been collected into a single knowledge base.

The Pandemic Effect aggregates the ideas of ninety of the world’s leading architects, landscape architects, designers, engineers, materials scientists, and public health experts—creating an expansive overview of insights, arguments, and strategies pertaining to the built environment’s relationship to communicable disease. Each entry is concise—a short-form article inspired by the letters model in journal publishing. Letters are, according to one definition, short articles that report results whose immediate availability to the scientific community is deemed important. In this case, the essays are written for the broader public. As the world continues to grapple with the debilitating effects of a multiyear pandemic, the need for immediate sharing is clear. Accordingly, the contributions contained herein are brief and to the point, each communicating a key idea and its supporting rationale in a quickly digestible format. In some cases, the entries represent the seeds of future projects; in others, they serve as snapshots of existing research. In such instances, each author and project is referenced for further study.

The book’s content is organized into five chapters. Histories offers an overview of past pandemics, technological and social responses, the insights of prior architectural approaches, and strategies for commemoration. Inside/Outside addresses the roles of building envelopes and mechanical systems in improving indoor environmental quality and harnessing the benefits of living systems. Interventions consists of contemporary methods for direct prevention and control as well as adaptation strategies for postpandemic spaces. New Strategies highlights problems in conventional architectural approaches and proposes various design alterations based on pandemic-influenced social transformations. Examples include new workplaces, residential designs, schools, event spaces, and medical delivery methods. Finally, The Public Realm considers the broader urban and exurban landscape and related social questions, including new schemes for urban design, mobility infrastructure, streets, parks, gardens, and urban furniture. Together, the contributions represent a broad, albeit incomplete, spectrum of opportunities to rethink the built environment in response to COVID-19.

In the future, architecture has the potential to be a cure—not a cause—of communicable illness. Immunization is defined as the process to make an organism resistant to a disease or pathogenic agent, or more generally to provide with protection against or immunity from something. Although the term typically refers to the organisms themselves, immunization might be conceptually applied at a larger scale—to describe the process of protecting human communities, or by extension, the built environment as a whole. The Sanitary Revolution and establishment of hygienic spaces have effectively reduced episodic pathogen transmission, but the coronavirus has revealed significant systemic failures in buildings’ and cities’ capabilities to protect against the spread of illness. If inoculation is the process whereby a pathogen is introduced to encourage the formation of new protections (antibodies), we might adopt the mindset that the built environment is now inoculated against SARS-CoV-2. The many astute, inventive, and pragmatic offerings included in the following pages represent architecture’s new defenses in the battle against infectious disease—and strategies for creating a healthier constructed world.

Chapter One

HISTORIES

Past responses to pandemics and the reconsideration of traditional design approaches

Pandemics are not a new phenomenon. The history of pandemics parallels the history of human civilization. Since the plague of Justinian (541–543 CE), there have been at least eighteen recorded pandemics. ¹ Defined as infectious outbreaks that grow to encompass an expansive territory, pandemics emerged with the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural communities and the growing frequency of human-animal interactions. ²

A pandemic is essentially the unexpected spread of illness at the most significant geographic scale. These factors distinguish